Survey Says: Parents Want Their Kids to Get Jobs; Academics Shocked

Inside Higher Education and Gallup have released a poll of attitudes toward higher education among parents with school-age children. The main finding is that most parents see higher ed as path to good jobs rather than an exercise in personal cultivation. They also see vocational and pre-professional training as more likely to lead to that outcome than study in the liberal arts. Finally, the poll found that parents care a lot about price. 68 percent of parents with high-school age children reported that they will be very or somewhat likely to restrict where their children apply to study based on the tuition they’ll be charged.

A representative of private liberal arts colleges quoted in the companion piece calls these results a “wake-up call”. If that’s what they are, members of the academic guild, which includes administrators and fulltime faculty, must be the only ones who are still asleep. As another Gallup poll showed earlier this year, Americans almost unanimously agree that it’s important to get a post-secondary degree or certification. The cause of this consensus is simple: Americans know that completing some form of higher ed has become a de facto requirement, although no guarantee, of decent employment. Mass enrollment in higher education, in other words, isn’t indicative of broad interest in the life of the mind. It’s a response to economic conditions.

Indeed, the structure of American higher education has been tied to the economy for decades. Although we prefer to remember it a reward for service, one justification for the 1944 GI Bill was that encouraging returning servicemen to go to college would prevent them from swamping the labor market. It’s possible that many Baby Boomers, who had grown up in the unexpected postwar boom, enrolled in higher education without thinking much about their futures. By the 1970s, however, students in a cooling economy were mostly concerned about jobs, as they have been ever since.

Rather than documenting a change in public opinion, then, the poll reflects an old disconnect between the guild and the public.

Administrators and fulltime faculty tend to see undergraduate education as just one part (and not necessarily the most important part) of higher education, which also includes research and graduate education. What’s more, they generally understand undergraduate education in terms of knowledge and skills that can be put to use in the classroom and evaluated by tests, writing assignments, or other academic measures.

Most parents and students see things differently. In their view, undergraduate teaching is the core of higher ed. And the success of that teaching should be measured by its contribution to economic success after graduation. That’s why parents and the politicians who represent them are so interested in tracking the careers of majors in different subjects.

Some of the distance between these views could be closed by better information. For example, parents tend to overestimate the importance of specific qualifications, while employers are often more interested in general abilities in reading, writing, and quantitative reasoning. Parents need to know that.

Academics could also do more to respond to economic concerns. Since many employers value analytic ability over job training, why not work to restore the integrity of classroom grades, which would allow outstanding students in the liberal arts to distinguish themselves from the pack? The institution of exit exams would also contribute to this goal.

Finally, the high-tuition, high-aid model in which the “sticker price” is considerably higher than the sums most students actually pay must be replaced with a more stable and transparent pricing system. If colleges and universities want to avoid scaring off parents, they must stop treating sky-high tuition fees as a starting point for negotiation.

Even these reforms, however, would not eliminate the fundamental disagreement between the guild and the public. The underlying issue is not the value of particular degrees or the price it’s reasonable to pay for them, but rather the purpose of post-secondary education. For decades, academics have assumed that their understanding of higher ed was, if not obviously true, then convincing to anyone exposed to the facts of the matter. Although it contains little news to off-campus readers, the new poll will be useful if it helps shatter that illusion once and for all.

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If college faculty and administrators really get this, that will be a wonderful thing. It is already happening at the community college level. They seem to be offering more value in this regard. At the university level, well, we’ll see.

I think the shift happened with the boomers, of which I am one. Sure, once upon a time a liberal arts education was a way to be exposed to a wide range of curriculum and provided with – in theory -a well-rounded education and an appreciation for continued learning. The initially very wide exposure also sets one up with the opportunity to find something to explore, major in, and possibly specialize in.

However, employers have increasingly required that job applicants have a college degree to even be considered for emplyment. This has been a huge change.

I don’t have one, but I started my career in 1973 and worked my way up through the trenches to an executive/ownership position, with invaluable mentoring by some terrific employers, and of course bucketloads of experience.

The same path is not generally open to people entering the job market in the late 20th century, or now, at least not in the professional workforce. In this regard I am a dinosaur. And, significantly, my current position resulted finally from being one of a two-man startup. I think that starting a business or getting into a young business is possibly the only other way to enter the professional workforce now.

The community colleges do appear to be preparing students for work, at least more so than the universities, and at a considerably lesser cost.

Higher education is a rip-off, and parents and students alike need to start treating educational debt like other debt: foolish, risky, immature, and to be strenuously avoided.

I attended two expensive big-name private universities, one for undergrad and one for law school, paying much of the cost with massive student loans.

I regret having done so; should have had the common sense to attend a State university in-state (either by staying in my home State or by moving to some other State and working/living there for a year before applying).

Hundreds of thousands of students who are currently borrowing large sums to attend private universities should instead wise up and go to schools they can afford to actually PAY FOR as they go, whether in-state tuition at a State university, or the first two years at a much cheaper community college before switching to a more “prestigious” four-year university.

Parents are deluded about the magical ability of college to get their child a job. More of that is up to their child than they think, regardless of college or major.

We have two neighbors whose children graduated from good colleges last year. One got a degree in business, the other a degree in English. Guess which one is employed? The English major, because she is motivated, willing to search creatively, and does not assume that the world now owes her the perfect job. The business major only wants exactly the job for which his degree prepared him.

On the one hand, my wife is following the academy’s ideal of higher education exactly. Her undergraduate study of German led her into a love of the language, culture, and literature, and she’s gone on to pursue an MA. She’s very likely going to go for a PhD afterward. The traditional academic model has served her wonderfully well.

On the other hand, my older brother had to go back to college after dropping out several years ago, because he realized that he can’t get a real job without a BA. He’s studying Anthropology because it interests him, but he considers his classes to be mostly a waste of time (especially liberal arts-type gen. ed. requirements, like studying foreign languages). He wishes he could do something with a lot more practical application, or just get a job without jumping through all the hoops.

What ought to happen is that “higher education” should bifurcate, between a traditional liberal arts/academic model to serve those who are actually devoted to study, and a separate system of more practical training for those who are after job skills.

Lots of foreign countries already have divided systems like this (for example, Germany), and it seems to work pretty well for them.

When I was in law school (2002-2005), the students and the faculty often seemed to disagree as to the purpose of the whole thing. Based on my experience, I would say that most students (myself included) showed up wanting a white collar vocational school, and most faculty hated that outlook and preferred to see law school as a branch of Academia. Similarly, based on my experience, most litigators regard law reviews as largely useless to the profession (except for articles that collect case law), whereas, in the law school environment, they are seen as important academic journals.

If I could wave a magic wand, I would turn law school into a two-year program emphasizing practical skills, but apparently people have been making that argument for decades without success. Even the present situation (high tuition, burdensome debt, not enough jobs) probably won’t lead to significant change.

“but he considers his classes to be mostly a waste of time (especially liberal arts-type gen. ed. requirements, like studying foreign languages).”

And one wonders why the American Empire was doomed to fail from the get-go. Americans couldn’t care less about the rest of the world or (heavens forbid) actually learning about another culture through the study of foreign languages. I wish any American who doesn’t know Spanish the best of luck in a decade or two.

General Business and Business Management and Administration are already the top two majors in the US. And they are the biggest joke majors I have ever seen, with even elite institutions offering classes for business majors on how to make powerpoint presentations.

Not to be too harsh on your older brother, but knowing a foreign language is far, far, far, FAR more likely to make him an attractive job candidate than an anthropology degree. Being bi-lingual gives you an immediate and large lead over otherwise similarly qualified (or even better qualified) candidates. Especially if that language is Spanish or Mandarin Chinese.

Is it true that “employers are often more interested in general abilities in reading, writing, and quantitative reasoning?” Really? Do you have any data to support that or are you just parroting the conventional wisdom of the academy?

My own experience is to the contrary – the majority of potential employers didn’t give a damn about my Ivy League liberal arts skills. They were looking for technical training in accounting, finance, engineering, science, computer science, etc.

“Administrators and fulltime faculty tend to see undergraduate education as just one part (and not necessarily the most important part) of higher education, which also includes research and graduate education.”

To be fair, Mr. Goldman, there is an easilly understandable reason for this view: Follow the money. Much of the compensation of full-time faculty has been based on research, not teaching, and the same goes for job retention.

Let’s also remember that it wasn’t just costs driving up the cost of tuition at a rate greater than inflation. It became a competitive advantage for second tier schools to jack up their tuition to Ivy League levels and beyond because that successfully signalled to folks that “Well, if NYU costs as much as Columbia or Cornell, than it must be just as good!”

Aside: As much as I loathe the swine that run NYU, I have got to give them credit for one hell of a marketing job over the last 25 years.

Thank you so much for the great link, paul. Five out of the top ten majors are Business-related, while only one is in the liberal arts (you know, those evil Marxists who brainwash our kids).

The four majors with 100% employment rates are also, not surprisingly, among the least popular majors. And isn’t it a perfect indicator of the financialization of the economy that the least popular major is Precision Production and Industrial Arts. One curveball: Educational Administration and Supervision is on both the Least Popular and Highest Unemployment lists. Hmmm?

Oh, and the median earnings for Elementary Education majors, you know, some of those overpaid teachers that conservative and liberal pundits alike blame for “the crisis in education,” and that Republican politicians like to verbally beat up while their Democratic counterparts go about quietly getting the same pound of flesh? $40,000. The lazy takers! No Pension for you!

Although it’s by no means the final word, this survey (https://www.metlife.com/assets/cao/contributions/foundation/american-teacher/MetLife_Teacher_Survey_2010.pdf) includes data on the skills that Fortune 1000 executives consider important for careers. Read from p. 147. You’ll find that they place quite a high value on skills associated with liberal education. One problem is that a degree in the liberal arts does not always indicate mastery of those skills. But that’s an issue of curriculum and assessment rather than one of inherent utility.

Maybe. But (1) I don’t see good data here on the tradeoff between liberal arts and technical training, which is, after all, the tradeoff that students actually need to make while in college. Trade-off (conjoint) research is expensive and complex. Anything less is just a “talk-is-cheap” exercise. And (2) there is a long tradition of Senior Executives giving lip service to the liberal arts, but that message may not make it to the HR people and lower level managers who do the entry level hiring.

I think people are a little to hard on some colleges and a little hypocritical. The economy was growing enough from 1950 to 1980 that anybody with a degree could get a job. I know that many recent retirees in IT and defense work had liberal arts degrees but the companies hired them and trained them on the job. The recently retired president of IBM has a poli sci degree, and Intel an accounting degree(not CPA) yet blasted colleges for not turning out Elec engineers. They would not have hired a younger version of themselves